What I'm seeing here is that Apple has a really shitty, poorly thought out design. To keep the phone useless to somebody who steals it, you have to keep it exposing your contact information so that people can threaten you.
The journalist:
- Marked the phone as lost;
- Wiped all data;
FTA: As quickly as possible, I did all the things you’re supposed to do when your phone is lost or stolen —- mark it as lost, cut off service, and remotely erase it
She did not, however, remove (delete) that iPhone from her iCloud account, which means that the iPhone can't be factory reset by the thieves because "FindMy" is still activated.
FTA: As long as I didn’t remove the phone from my Apple account or the Find My app, the phone was essentially bricked to anyone without the passcode and my iCloud password
The iPhone did not, at any time, leak any personal information. What probably happened is that she had a SIM card on it, and from ejecting the tray and putting the SIM into another phone they managed to get her phone number, from which they started contacting her with the threats/scams.
I think this wouldn't even be possible with a e-SIM in the newer iPhone models.
Right, now we have e-SIMs. So what was the reason for physical SIMs in the first place?
Yes, I know, in many anti-social places in the world (like most US cities), it's much more likely that the phone was stolen, or that even in the lost-phone case, the person who finds it will be shitty and not try to return it. But in many (most?) other places people are generally honest and will try to return something that's lost.
Then again, if you know that it was stolen, you should be able to keep the thief from getting your contact info.
“when trying to reset my phone they are prompted to enter my iCloud password. My iCloud email is also one of the ways to reach me via iMessage. So they used that to contact me”
And yes, e-SIM solves this problem.
Edit: she replied to a comment on the article: "when trying to reset my phone they are prompted to enter my iCloud password. My iCloud email is also one of the ways to reach me via iMessage. So they used that to contact me"
These are the type of things that make it very hard for Apple to penetrate markets outside the US.
Some people are mentioning that if Apple is given the phone, Apple will also help (and that they'd prefer to not put that message in place as a result).
> These are the type of things that make it very hard for Apple to penetrate markets outside the US.
Can you explain how this is much worse than, say, Google or Samsung?
No, they will not. It is just a wish. And it makes little sense for Apple to be doing that.
If you bring a found iPhone to Apple, Apple will not tell you any information about the associated customer. They don't have any infrastructure to return it. The only thing they can and will do is take the device and recycle it.